By Janet Hulstrand

1880: On the Rue St. Georges in Paris’s 9th arrondissement, a painter of growing renown in both avant-garde and fashionable circles is having lunch at the crémerie where he often takes his meals. At nearly 40 years of age he is finally beginning to make his mark in the art world: his painting of Madame Charpentier and her children made a splash a year earlier at the Salon of 1879, which has provided needed income; and his other work, experimenting with new techniques of painting en pleine aire, is going well too.

He sees a pretty young woman enter the place with her mother. He sees in her instantly his ideal type: not too thin, rosy-cheeked, and with skin that “takes the light.” He introduces himself—his name is Auguste Renoir—and asks her if she will model for him….

The young woman, Aline Charigot, 21 years old, was from the village of Essoyes in the deep south of the Champagne region, near its border with Burgundy. She had begun her life in this village as an abandoned child: her father had walked out of their home one night before she was two years old and never returned to the family, leaving her mother without any means of support. Unable to pay the rent, or to provide for her child, the mother, like so many other poor women in rural France at the time, left for Paris to earn her living as a seamstress, leaving Aline with relatives, who would raise her. At age 15 Aline joined her mother in Paris and began to learn her trade. And that is when she met the man, the artist, who would change her life.

Aline accepted the invitation to model for Renoir and shortly after, they became lovers. In 1885 their first child, Pierre, was born. As the years went by, Aline made two significant requests of Renoir. One was to make their union legal by marriage. The other was to buy a home in Essoyes, the village where she had grown up.

He had no objection to the first request: by this time in his life he was ready to settle down. And so the marriage was performed in the district hall of Paris’s 9th arrondissement on April 14, 1890.

However, he was much less enthusiastic about the idea of spending much time so far away from Paris, the center of the art world, as well as the place where he had spent most of his life. Essoyes, today just 2½ hours away from Paris, was at the time a long and tedious journey, first by rail, then by horse-drawn carriage, that would have taken most of a day.

But eventually Aline’s entreaties won him over, and her dream of living a bourgeois life in her hometown came true. They initially rented a small house at the edge of the village during the summer of 1888, for a stay that lingered into the fall and even through the end-of-year holidays. In time Renoir became very fond of Essoyes, of the butter, the wine, the bread made there, declaring it superior to that in Paris. He said he loved being among the winegrowers “because they are generous.” He painted portraits of his family, of villagers, of the surrounding landscapes. The family was still spending much of the year in Paris, but from the late 1880s they began to regularly spend summers in Essoyes, the boy playing, the painter painting, the wife cooking. (She became famous among his artist friends for her culinary skills, in particular for her bouillaibaisse.)

Gabrielle Renard

By now, in his early 50s, Renoir’s work was selling well: he had achieved middle-class respectability, a position he balked at, but his wife took comfort in. By the time their second child, Jean, was born in 1894, they were able to hire a nanny, and Aline, now Madame Renoir, looked to her home village, and her family, for an appropriate person to fill this role. She found her in Gabrielle Renard, a young cousin living in Essoyes.

Like Aline, Gabrielle had not had an easy start in life: her mother was a widower who became pregnant out of wedlock, which subjected her to the disdain and disapproval of many villagers and even caused her own family to take her two older children away from her. So for Gabrielle too, the connection with Auguste Renoir would become a means of escape: she traveled and lived with the family in Paris, and later in Cagnes-sur-Mer, a town along the Riviera where the family would winter. Gabrielle became one of Renoir’s favorite models, the subject of literally hundreds of his paintings and drawings, including some of his most famous portraits—and a lifelong, dearly beloved maternal figure for Jean Renoir.

In 1896, the Renoirs bought the first home they had ever owned, on the edge of Essoyes. A two-story home with an open courtyard facing the street, and a spacious garden at the back of the house, this house became the center of the domestic life Aline had craved and Renoir scarcely knew he wanted but did appreciate when he had it.

For Jean Renoir, the second son, a filmmaker, the time spent in Essoyes became a kind of idyllic memory that he treasured all his life. “Essoyes, where my mother was born, has remained more or less unspoiled,” he wrote years later. “There is no other place like it in the whole wide world. There I spent the best years of my childhood…Every summer we would go back. My mother would invite friends and surround Renoir with this life that he loved so much…”

Ambroise Vollard, who became both the dealer and a friend for Renoir, as well as the dealer for many of the other artists in his circle, also recognized the importance of the ways in which Aline provided support to the artist in her own simple way. “I wonder if it is generally known that it is largely due to his wife that Renoir painted all his wonderful still lifes of flowers,” he wrote. “She knew what pleasure it gave him to paint flowers, but she realized that the trouble of going to get them was too much for him. So she always had them about the house…”

Jean also saw how important his mother was in his father’s life, and how well she understood him: “With her intuitive, rustic understanding, she saw that Renoir was made for painting the way vines are made to produce wine…” he wrote.

At first Renoir painted in a ground floor studio in the house. Nine years after they purchased the house, he built a studio at the far end of the garden, further evidence of their growing roots there. He built the studio, he said, so that he could paint “without disturbing the children at their play.” It was in this studio that he also worked on his first sculptures. Of course many of the works he did in Essoyes began en pleine aire. (Today several of those spots are marked with easels displaying reproductions of the works he painted there.)

Though by now he loved being in Essoyes, the damp climate in Champagne, with its cold winters, was not good for his increasingly severe case of rheumatoid arthritis. By 1907 his doctor had ordered a move to the South of France, and the Renoirs found a place in Cagnes-sur-Mer, where the the family began spending their winters in 1908. It was in Cagnes that Gabrielle met her future husband, Conrad Slade, an American painter. During the Second World War the Slades moved to the U.S., and in 1955, after her husband died, Gabrielle moved to California to be near Jean Renoir, who had also moved there during the war. They maintained a close relationship for the rest of Gabrielle’s life. “She taught me to see the face behind the mask and the fraud behind the flourishes,” said the filmmaker whose work shows great insight into both.

While they continued to spend time in Essoyes when they could, both of the Renoirs died on the Riviera: Aline in Nice in 1915, and her husband in Cagnes-sur-Mer in 1919. And though they were originally buried in the south of France, their remains were later returned to Essoyes for burial, in accordance with their wishes. Now they and all three of their sons, and some of the sons’ children and wives, are buried in the village cemetery, just a short walk away from the painter’s studio.

All three of the Renoir sons became artists: Pierre, a well-known actor of screen and stage; Jean, the director of La Grande Illusion and La Règle du Jeu, among many other films; and Claude, the youngest, a ceramist.

The house in Essoyes remained in the Renoir family and was used by Sophie Renoir, a granddaughter of Pierre Renoir, and her family until 2012. She then sold it to the municipality of Essoyes, which purchased the property in order to turn it into the centerpiece of Du côté des Renoir, Essoyes’ homage to the family. Renoir’s studio opened to the public in 2011: there is also a small but informative interpretive center next to the village hall.

Images of Aline and her young cousin, Gabrielle are prominently displayed in the streets of Essoyes. Several murals in the village reproduce Renoir paintings in which they appear: one, a portrait of Gabrielle and Jean Renoir as an infant, is on the site of Gabrielle’s birthplace.

The Year of Renoir

In honor of the public opening of Renoir family home on June 3, Aube, the department or sub-region in which Essoyes is located, has designated 2017 as the Year of Renoir. One of the major events is an exhibition entitled Un autre Renoir (Another Renoir) presented at the Museum of Modern Art in Troyes from June 17 to September 17 featuring portraits of the Renoir family and of Gabrielle, along with landscapes of the region.

Several Renoir works, on loan from museums in Bordeaux, Rouen, and Cagnes-sur-Mer, will be displayed in the Renoir home during the summer months. A weekend celebration called “Essoyes à la Belle Epoque” will take place on July 22 and 23.

Throughout the summer Bernard Pharisien, a local historian, will lead free walking tours of the village Sat., Sun., Mon. and Tues. mornings, in French only. Tours in English can be arranged for groups of 12 or more by writing to groupes.renoir@gmail.com

Champagne

The names Essoyes and Aube might be off the radar to most travelers, but the wines of champagne certainly aren’t. Indeed, Essoyes is one of the villages within the Côte des Bar growing area for champagne grapes. Visitors have the possibility to visit small grower-producers in Essoyes, as well as producers, from large champagne houses to small producers, in the surrounding area.

Getting to Essoyes

Essoyes is a 2 ½ hour drive from Paris. Troyes is an hour and a half train ride from Gare de l’Est in Paris: from there Essoyes is just under an hour’s drive southeast, through vineyards, fields of rapeseed and wheat, and beautiful rural villages. Trains run frequently from Paris’s Gare de l’Est to Troyes: some trains continue on to Vendeuvre sur Barse (one stop beyond Troyes) and Bar sur Aube. In Troyes you can rent a car from Hertz or Enterprise, both located near the train station (check opening times of rental agencies before purchasing train ticket). It’s also possible to take a taxi from Vendeuvre to Essoyes, about a 30-minute drive.

For further information

Essoyes Tourist Office: www.ot-essoyes.fr
Aube Tourist Office: www.aube-champagne.com/en/
Year of Renoir 2017: www.aube-champagne.com/fr/annee-renoir-2017/
Troyes Tourist Office: www.tourisme-troyes.com
Aube Champagne Growers: www.cap-c.fr

Another major art event in the department of Aube this year is the opening of the Camille Claudel Museum in Nogent-sur-Seine.

A Renoir Route that follows in the painter’s footsteps and naturally include Essoyes has been outlined as one of a dozen Impressionism Routes by the French association Eau et Lumière.

© 2017, Janet Hulstrand

Janet Hulstrand is a writer, editor and teacher of writing and literature who divides her time between France and the United States. She writes the blog Writing from the Heart, Reading for the Road. Other articles that Janet Hulstrand has written for France Revisited can be found here.

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The post The Painter’s Wife: Aline Charigot Renoir and the Renoir Home in Essoyes appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

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By Elise Prudhomme

André Le Nôtre designed the Garden of Versailles to display, reflect and serve as the backdrop for the pomp and glory and power of the reign of Louis XIV. As such the garden functioned as a direct extension of the palace itself.

Piqued by Nicolas Fouquet’s audacious success with the Château of Vaux-le-Vicomte which he visited in 1661, Louis XIV enlisted the three men who had contributed to that success—the architect Louis Le Vau, the painter-decorator Charles Le Brun and the landscape gardener André Le Nôtre—to create the palace of all palaces: Versailles.

Over more than 50 years of adult reign, the king would devote much of his time and energy, when France was not at war, to enlarging and embellishing the 800 hectares (1977 acres) of land called the Domain of Versailles which now contains 200,000 trees, 50 fountains and 620 water jets fed by 35 km (21.7 miles) of water pipeline. In a monumental example of man’s attempt to balance order and disorder, culture and nature, spontaneity and reflection, Le Nôtre served the king by creating architecture from nature.

Through his self-incarnation as the Sun King, Louis XIV used metaphor and symbolism as constant echoes and demonstrations of his power. From the king’s ceremonial dressing and rise in the morning (le lever du Roi) to his ceremonial undressing and putting to bed at night (le coucher du Roi), by way of a well-regulated day that included a walk in the garden under the watchful eye of the Court, Louis XIV exposed his lives to the public eye with the aim of concentrating and asserting their power. Integral part of this goal, the Garden of Versailles served the strategic purpose of promoting the king’s power while amusing and containing the masses of Court subjects, twin arms in preventing them from plotting against him.

The garden was an immediate reflection of his public image as the Sun King. An important quantity of statuary representing classical themes was ordered in 1674 by Louis XIV to embellish the parterres, and in the same year the king ordered the addition to the Grand Canal called Little Venice where gondolas and decorative boats were docked to serve the pleasures of the Court. Louis XIV’s strongest ally, Apollo (the Greek Sun-god or God of Light), is represented in fountains and grottos and statuary throughout the garden to allude to the king’s omnipresence.

The mastermind behind this colossal project was André Le Nôtre. The king himself poured over the plans. Careful and strategic planning was required to create a garden that was at once opulent, in phase with the palace, able to reveal and dissimulate through nature so that discovery of the garden became an adventure and a distraction in itself, all the while speaking of the power and glory of Louis XIV.

The foundation of André Le Nôtre’s creation was shear manpower; millions of men, regiments even, were involved in transforming the landscape and diverting water here. Chariots and wheelbarrows containing countless tons of earth were required to transform the prairies and swamp land which originally constituted the Domain of Versailles. Trees were brought to Versailles from all over France to stabilize and maintain this earthly base, transforming flatlands into hilled woodland. Andre Le Nôtre worked with subtlety and mathematical know-how, tried and tested at the Tuileries Gardens and Vaux-le-Vicomte, to create illusions of perspective which evolve as the garden unfolds.

André Le Nôtre’s genius is particularly evident in the walls of the Sun King’s “outdoor palace.” Masses of hedges form bosquets, behind which follies and fountains reveal themselves like little theaters or tableaux vivants. Walking through the gardens, one is struck by the density and size of these thickets and the quantity of trellis work that prevents the untamed forest areas from invading the paths. While providing shade, these geometrically trimmed vegetal walls protect from wind and give shelter to birds and small wildlife. It is interesting to notice today that the areas of the garden that are in the process of being replanted are initially delimited by trellis work, as if the first step in the garden’s construction.

André Le Nôtre did not content himself with the construction of just one wall, however; there are walls within walls. The bosquets are often doubled with a second wall of vegetation, trimmed and adorned with statuary which offers heightened visual complexity and a shady path. The final flourish is a third row of topiary statues, notably along the east-west axis extending from the palace to the Grand Canal and the north-south axis leading to Neptune’s Basin. Nature in this case, serves a decorative rather than functional purpose, heralded by white marble or dark stone statuary providing contrast in texture and color to the pervasive green of the garden.

This is the orderly representation of the Garden of Versailles, where nature is trimmed (they cut the topiary statues using life-size cardboard models for accuracy), trained, maintained. This is also a visually unstructured aspect of André Le Nôtre’s garden architecture which is demonstrated in the King’s Garden: here an aboretum coexists in harmony and color with low topiary hedges and grassy lawns. The trees act like a bosquet, preventing the viewer from seeing out beyond his immediate surroundings, while providing shelter from wind.

The Park of Versailles begins past the Apollo Fountain and beyond the wrought iron gates that delimit the Garden of Versailles. If the Garden of Versailles is Louis XIV’s outdoor palace, the park—which includes forests, fields and the gardens of the Trianon Palaces—can be seen as the garden of the Garden, in that it is just as carefully maintained and planned in its “wooded” form as the former is in its “constructed” form.

Walking past the garden gates one leaves beyond the imposing formality of the Garden of Versailles to visit the Grand and Petit Trianons and their respective gardens and beyond the Petit Trianon to the Queen’s Hamlet, a quaint working farm as desired by Marie-Antoinette. These gardens are exceptionally charming because they are smaller in size and scope as well as being less formal and more romantic, making them a treat for any photographer willing to venture beyond the crowds.

While André Le Nôtre successfully built Louis XIV’s garden to reflect the king’s power and to capture the attention of the masses, I don’t believe that he could have imagined in his wildest dreams that this glorious place would attract some many visitors for many years to come. Yet the garden still manages to conquer in splendor. Now, if only they would replace the golf carts and tourist “trains” with Apollo’s chariots and horses.

Text and images © Elise Prudhomme.

A Philadelphia-born photographer living in Paris since 1990, Elise Prudhomme developed a passion for photography during university years at Smith College. In addition to her own photography, she directs Studio Galerie B&B, an art gallery, photo studio, darkroom facility and digital imaging center in Paris, 6 bis rue des Récollets, near Canal Saint-Martin in the 10th arrondissement. More images can been seen at www.eliseprudhomme.com.

Also see Elise’s text and images concerning the Tuileries Garden.

The post Yours, Mine, Le Nôtre’s: An American Photographer Examines the Garden of Versailles appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

The festival, which takes places through the month of April, reveals a diversity of approaches to travel and place—poetic, harsh, intimate, imaginary, mysterious, playful—by French photographers who collectively present far-flung “itineraries” from Bordeaux to Tokyo to Africa to South America.

Their work is shown in thirteen venues spread throughout Bordeaux (museums, galleries, garden gates, public spaces), with most of the venues being devoted to the work of individual photographers. Entrance to all venues is free.

Among the photographers for the festival’s 2012 edition are:

Sophie Chausse, who returns to her native Gabon 20 years after leaving the country:

Cyrus Cornet, who takes an “antivoyage” into the French suburbs:

Damien Guillaume, who brought back still-life images from travels in South America:

Christopher Héry, who photographed individuals encountered in Nigeria:

Pascal Ken, who presents images of seven days in Tokyo:

Julien Lombardi, who examines a city’s potential for drift, whether natural, uncontrolled or dangerous:

Thibault de Puyfontaine, whose “Late Colors,” images from Egypt and Mozambique, were shown in Paris in 2011, as described at the time on France Revisited:

Kristine Thiemann, who presents a playful vision of Bordeaux’s Benauge quarter:

Itinéraires des Photographes Voyageurs, Bordeaux, an annual festival of travel photography taking place in April. For more information see www.itiphoto.com.

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The portraits in this show were created with the wet plate collodion process, a photographic technique developed in the 1850s that corresponds well with what Jacobson calls his “preoccupation with otherness.”

That preoccupation was more apparent in the haunting portraits presented in his 2010 show “Glass Memories” at Centre Iris, just north of the Pompidou Center (see map below), based on the same process.

In “The American West Portraits” the otherness is less in the foreground, less in-your-face. Perhaps that’s because while “Glass Memories” was partially realized in Germany, where Jacobson, originally from Ogden, Utah, had expatriated himself and his family from 2006 to 2011, “The American West Portraits” reflect a homecoming.

Last year the photographer left Viernheim (Hesse), Germany and moved to Denver, a city he says he selected among a hatfull of western cities.

During an interview prior to the March 14 opening of the new show, Jacobson said along with the culture shock of returning to the U.S. after five years in Europe he was struck the diversity of people in Denver.

While French viewers are undoubtedly drawn to the exoticism of the American West, not only because of distance but because nation-building through frontier settlement has no equivalent on European soil, American viewers will find some familiarity in these new portraits; we recognize in them characters from the 19th-century western town of our own imagination, circa 1876, say, the year Colorado joined the Union.

The wet plate collodion process results in singular images on either glass (ambrotype) or metal (alumitype or ferrotype). Created with a 150-year-old technique, these brownish-grey portraits naturally give the impression that the subjects lived in another era. That impression is reinforced by Jacobson’s eye for and attraction to individuals on “the fringe of society.”

Another factor may well be at play: whether on the fringes or in the center, society—in this case Denver society—is undoubtedly formed of many of the same elements in 2011 as it was in 1876.

This, for example, could be the portrait of a cattle rancher come to town on business, though the title reads “Cannabis farmer”:

This could certainly be a character from post-Gold Rush Denver:

This could be an outcast in any age, or perhaps a man on his way to the gallows:

Sitting for portraits, Jacobson says, his subject do indeed imagine themselves in 19th century photography and positions, such as a fiddler holding his instrument like a rifle. Strangely, it’s only a blind woman who is clearly from a more recent area due to the fluffy light-colored blouse she’s worn for her portrait. Otherwise, the portraits can be transposed to the Wild West, even if their titles clearly place them in the present, such as “Rap promoter” or “Jewish punk rocker.”

Kyleigh, who seems to be one of Jacobson’s muses in this recent work, appears several times in this exhibition. Drawn down by dreadlocks, her gaze, having been held still for a full six seconds to fix the image, could be either that of a turn-of-this-century middle-class child gone Rasta in rebellion or that of the 19th-century daughter of a Scottish settler and an American Indian. Either way she appears to be waiting to discover who she is or who she wants to be. The largest of her portraits is hung at the far end of this basement gallery, as though at the focal point of a grotto chapel.

The basement exhibition space is well adapted to Jacobson’s work and their appearance of found artifacts of another era.

Quinn Jacobson gave a demonstration of the collodion technique prior to the opening and will be giving other workshops and photographing individuals at times during the run of the show (see schedule below). Watching him prepare his subject, introduce plates, count the seconds of posing time, pull out vials of his chemical mixtures, pour liquids onto the plates, and heat them to the point of nearly burning his fingers, comment on the serendipitous nature of the technique, and hearing him tell how he came to love one of his glass plate portraits that had been accidently shattered to many pieces that were then put together, it is clear that Jacobson is not a point and shoot kind of guy.

He cites the visual, olfactory and tactile aspects of the process as elements that can “reengage people with the craft of photography” and bring about “the personal connection that’s missing today.

He nevertheless willingly allowed this writer to photograph him in instant pixels.

From collodion to daguerreotype

With this show, Jacobson brings an end to his personal evolution in working with the collodion process.

“After ten years in collodion I have nothing more to say about it [in my work],” he said. “It’s run its course.”

His interest has now turned 15 years further back in the history of photography to daguerreotypes, named for Frenchman Louis Daguerre, who perfected his technique in 1839.

Since 2010 Jacobson has been working increasingly with in “authentic mercurial daguerreotype” and will largely devote himself to that for the foreseeable future.

In 2014, the 175th anniversary of the year Daguerre perfected his technique, the Centre Iris will be hosting a show of Jacobson’s daguerreotypes. The gallery is just half a mile from the site of the laboratory where Daguerre developed his technique by what is now Place de la République, as indicated on this plaque.

“The American West Portraits” by Quinn Jacobson at the Centre Iris pour la photographie, March 15 to June 19, 2012. 238 rue Saint-Martin, 3rd arrondissement. Metro Arts et Métiers. Tel. 01 48 7 06 09. Open Tues.-Sat. 2-7 p.m. Free admission. Prices of these single-sample works run from 600 to 5000 euros.

Quin Jacobson’s Workshops: Jacobson is running five 2-day workshops in English initiating participants in the wet collodion process on March 19 and 20, March 21 and 22, May 30 and 31, June 5 and 6, and June 7 and 8, 650-725€ per person. Contact Centre Iris for more information.

Back in Denver he gives workshops at the Colorado Photographic Art Center.

Your collodion portrait: Individuals can have Quinn Jacobson create their own one-of-a-kind collodion portraits—“handmade artifacts,” he calls them—on glass or metal by signing up in advance for a 30-minute photo session on March 13, 15, 16 and 17, May 29, June 4 and 9. Cost 160-235€ depending on size.

Explaining the wet plate collodion process: Jacobson explains the process, followed by a video demonstration here.

Quinn Jacobson’s website: Studio Q.

© 2012, Gary Lee Kraut

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A flâneur is a man about town, often alone, out to experience the city not so much as a gathering place for a dense population but rather as an anonymous and varied space where he encounters buildings, streets, shop windows, parks, gardens and cafés. Every visitor who has spent more than a few days in Paris understands how well the French capital lends itself to “flanning.”

“Flanning” is a dreamy state, bemused though not ironic, perhaps melancholic though  never depressed, often witnessing but not reflecting too deeply or at great length—there is always another scene or another street to draw his attention away from a singular thought. On his slow, idling stroll through the city, the flâneur abandons himself to the sights and sounds and scenes and views and oddities of the moment.

Paris Photos – Paris Walks, a handsome 176-page, hardback, black-and-white photographic essay, is the fruit of O’Toole’s “flanning” in Paris between 1996 and 2007. O’Toole lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota. The book was printed in Minneapolis.

As a flâneur, O’Toole rarely stops to talk with people (we encounter few in his photographs), though occasionally he observes them. Mostly he avoids crowds, except to occasionally view them from a distance.

Does he wish that he could enter into or be a part of a social scene? I don’t know. But in the absence of a willingness or ability to take part in the social life of the city, it appears from these photos that O’Toole would rather have the streets of Paris himself.

In O’Toole’s Paris it is mid-spring (tulips are coming up, and the linden leaves are budding the garden of Palais Royal) or summer (the roses are out in the Bagatelle Garden and the trees provide full shade in the Boulogne Woods) or September (the leaves of the horse chestnut trees have begun falling in Place Dauphine). In any case it is light jacket weather. There is often dampness in the air.

The long shadows in many images indicate that the photographer is especially fond of Paris within an hour or two or sunrise or sunset.

Tourists are avoids: the courtyard of the Louvre is empty, the top of Montmartre is quiet. Yet as a flâneur Peter O’Toole is clearly a visitor, so even if he doesn’t necessarily seek out the clichés of Paris, he does have a romanticized view of the city.

His gaze in the book’s 150 tri-tone black-and-white photographs, some grainy depending on the film speed, seems to seek out Paris of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. One could easily mistake these images as coming from earlier decades. Whether shot from the hip or with a tripod or with camera to the eye, his Leica is a tool for nostalgia.

Most of the photographs, O’Toole says, are presented full-frame and uncropped, but he has nevertheless shielded his lens from any indications of a contemporary evolving city. Woody Allen shares that view in presenting the city’s easy-going and “natural” beauty in his film “Paris at Midnight”; Allen’s streets and shops and cafés, like O’Toole’s, are always inviting, rarely crowded. The city employees, waiters and tradesmen work earnestly, unobtrusively, without complain.

There is tendency in such a collection of photographs or such a movie to gloss over the realities of city life, but whereas Allen’s characters are fatally stuck in their search to simultaneously express private wealth and personal fulfillment, O’Toole, to his credit, seems to enjoy the romanticized city without visible angst.

The 150 photographs of O’Toole’s book are ostensibly presented in the form of a series of promenades, with each of the 14 sections preceded by a map outlining the photographer’s route and a brief introductory text in both French and English. However, Paris Walks shouldn’t be seen as a call to take specific routes but rather as an invitation to flâner on your own.

Paris Photos ~ Paris Walks by Peter J. O’Toole is 176 pages hardbound, with 150 tri-tone black and white Paris photographs arranged in 14 chapters each representing a separate area of the city. Published in 2009, with a first printing of 1700 copies, it is available in the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and on Amazon.com. Retail price: $44.95.

© 2011, Gary Lee Kraut

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Centre Iris… pour la photographie is disconnected from the gallery landscape of Paris both for its situation north of the Pompidou Center and its exhibition space in a vaulted white-washed basement.

That’s a disconnect that makes it perfectly suited for the intense and haunting portraits by American photographer Quinn Jacobson in an exhibit of his work entitled “Glass Memories,” showing until June 19, 2010.

Jacobson used the photographic technique known as the wet plate collodion process in creating the images for the show. Most are on glass (ambrotype), with several on metal (ferrotype).

Wet plate collodion photography, developed in the 1850s, is fairly primitive in photographic term. It competed with daguerreotype and other technical developments of the time, and by the 1880s it had all but disappeared in favor of dry plates.

The process gives a brownish-gray coloring that has the immediate mark of memory. In using it Jacobson stays clear of nostalgia in favor of an accentuated present, a kind of what-was-still-is or what-is-harkens-to-what-was. The fact that the sitter must remain still for several seconds or more while being photographed using this process give an intensity to their otherwise flat expressions, as though he or she is trying to stay still and unflinching while blood is being drawn. To help the sitter remain still, an eerie head-support is sometimes used during the shooting, making it appear as those individuals were part of an experiment.

Jacobson has written: “Collodion’s unique esthetic gives a half-remembered dream quality evoking the feeling of memory. It’s hauntingly beautiful and reveals deep, poignant qualities about the people I photograph. It also allows me to interact with the sitter in ways traditional photography doesn’t. Because of the commitment (time, complexity and stubbornness) of the process, I feel that the sitter co-creates the image with me.”

The exhibit focuses on two subjects/locations. The first, entitled “The Portraits of Madison Avenue,” introduces us residents of a low-income neighborhood in Ogden, Utah. The second, “Vergangenheitsbewaltïgung,” examines the relation of the present to the past in Germany relative to Kristallnacht and the Holocaust. Jacobson was born in 1964 in Ogden, Utah. A descendant on his father’s side of European Jews, he now lives in Germany.

The Portraits of Madison Avenue

Jacobson’s Madison Avenue is far removed from New York’s Madison Avenue. It is a street in Ogden where his father owned a low-income apartment complex. In creating this series of portrait he visits his own memories of traveling there with his father in the early 1970s by photographing individuals who live there today. These were and are people who, he notes, live “on the fringes of society. They fascinated me then and have deeply affected me to this day.”

Here are Kayla, an African American Jehova Witness, Dale, a paranoid Schizophrenic, Tim and Gale, day laborers, Dusty, a convicted sex offender, Keith, a biker, Merrym, who lost her leg to a flesh eating bateria, and others.

Reading those tag lines, which are actually titles, one might imagine that the images show individuals on the down and out. Yet this is not an exhibit of afflictions but rather of acceptance, fate, and of individual gazes. There are several frightening images (e.g. a man holding a gun to his head), but we are not repulsed by these individuals; instead we are drawn to them, we want to meet them. They invite reflections on the humanity of our own Madison Avenues.

Jacobson considers his use of wet plate collodion for these portraits “as a metaphor as it relates to abandonment. The process was abandoned and forgotten, just as most marginalized people are by the mainstream. I also embrace it for its imperfections; echoing our human imperfections.”

You can view many of the images from that part of the exhibition here.

Vergangenheitsbewaltïgung

The tangled German title of the second half of the exhibition means “Struggling with coming to terms with the past.” As Jacobson explains, “My project deals with the tension between the memory of these events and the idea of ‘the other’ today in Germany.” The project is also an exploration of the photographer’s own Jewish roots and the Holocaust through people and place in Germany today. Jacobson has a series of Stars of David tattooed on his arm. He now lives in Germany.

These portraits, along with some landscapes and settings where he’s “felt a certain kind of ‘presence’ of the past, offer a more personal vision than Madison Avenue. Here, Jacobson is searching for some understanding and/or connection while pursuing the watchwords, “Never Forget.”

There are a couple of attractively ghostly landscapes in this series, a superb portrait entitled “Nordic Man” (the photographic technique and the stillness of the subjects produces portraits whose intense gaze is accentuated in lighter-color eyes), and a power self-portrait entitled “Jewish DNA,” though on the whole I find these images less telling than Madison Avenue. Unlike the Madison Avenue portraits, where the photographer is like a nurse drawing blood, there is a distance between the photographer and his German subjects.

You can view some images from that part of the exhibition here.

Together, the two parts of the exhibit make for a worthwhile detour to a gallery to watching.

* * *

“Glass Memories” by Quinn Jacobson, March 10 to June 19 at the Centre Iris… pour la photographie, 238 rue Saint-Martin, 3rd arrondissement. Metro Arts et Métiers. www.centre-iris.fr/. Open Tues.-Sat. 2-7 p.m.

Here’s a video in which the photographer explains and demonstrates the process.

Jacobson refers to works using this process as “handmade artifacts.” Each image is unique. Prices of these single-sample works run from 600 to 3000 euros.

© 2010, Gary Lee Kraut

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The 60 stark black-and-white images of anima show creatures that are tired, hungry, caged, vagabond, alerted, wary, hunting, approaching, moving away, holding their ground, or simply watching: a dog in a lake, a sleeping donkey, two black cats against an white sky, an owl on the ground, a canine in an empty parking lot, a wary ox, birds in flight on a hazy night, a drooling cow with an intense gaze, an overfed pigeon, two leopards reacting to something in the dark.

The background in these photos is either pitch black or vague white. And there is pronounced silence to the images even though the picture hints at noise (water, wind, a growl, flight).

We may find in these images glimpses of our own fatigue or hunger or wariness, but these aren’t anthropomorphic vision of the animal world.

But before long we realize that what we are seeing is not that bit of us in them but rather how we are entirely like them, not as “animals” but as animated beings, or simply as beings—period. The odd inclusion of an image of weeds at night reinforces the concept that what we are seeing in anima are various forms of beings in the night. It’s no wonder then that images are alternately peaceful, amusing, and frightening.

The exhibition, running through November 21, 2009, is the endnote of the Prix d’Excellence that Mr. Spricigo was awarded in 2008. The prize includes a grant of 15,000 euros allowing confirmed photographers to carry out a significant project of their choice and to be known to the public, namely through this show.

Jean-François Spricigo was born in Tournai, Belgium, in 1979, and now navigates between Paris and Brussels. He is represented in Paris by the Galerie Agathe Gaillard in the Marais.

anima is a free exhibition on display Oct. 29-Nov. 21, 2009, in the Salle Comtesse de Caen at the Institut de France, 27 quai de Conti, in the 6th arrondissement. Open Tues.-Sun. 11am-6pm. A chance to see a fascinating exhibit and the Intitute up close.

The opening of this show on Oct. 28 was also the occasion for the Académie des Beaux-Arts to announce the winner of the 2009 prize: Thibault Cuisset. He received the honored for his project “En Campagne” (In the Country or Countryside).

Mr. Cuisset explained to the jury that in developing this project he wishes to have a eye “‘of the here and now’ without patriotism or nostalgia on our French countryside… perhaps most ordinary but still very much alive and that participates to the great diversity of landscapes that can been seen in France.” It’s a task that’s far more difficult than it may sound precisely because the French countryside is so intimately connected with patriotism and nostalgia. The result of that project will be exhibited in November 2010.

Born in Maubeuge in northern France in 1958, Thibault Cuisset now lives in the Paris suburb of Montreuil. He is represented in Paris by the Galerie les Filles du Calvaire in the Marais.

Mr. Cuisset was selected from among 200 entrants then 10 finalists. The other finalists were Lucie et Simon (a duo), Jean-Christian Bourcart, Patricia Canino, Luc Choqueur, Eric Dexheimer, Claudine Doury, Denis Rouvre, Ambroise Tézenas, Alain Turpault.

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